Fritz Hugh Ludlow became the best-selling author of The Hasheesh Eater in the years before the Civil War. His best-seller related his visionary experiences with large, oral doses of hashish, along with his religious, philosophical and medical reflections on the altered states they produced. He became a celebrated figure in the Bohemian circles of New York, along with such friends as Walt Whitman. A short-story writer, a drama and music critic and a journalist, he mingled with the high society of New York while dissolutely wandering among the disreputable, hard-drinking literati.
Inner Space/Outer Space brings together much of the exciting work contributing to a new synthesis of modern physics. Particle physicists, concerned with the "inner space" of the atom, are making discoveries that their colleagues in astrophysics, studying outer space, can use to develop and test hypotheses about the events that occurred in the microseconds after the Big Bang and that shaped the universe as we know it today. The papers collected here, from scores of scientists, constitute the proceedings of the first major international conference on research at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics, held in May 1984. The editors have written introductions to each major section that draw out the central themes and elaborate on the primary implications of the papers that follow.
Based on a series of lectures that Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan gave to a small group of students in Brooklyn in 1981, this contains transcripts of the series on the Kabbalistic system, and testifies to his wonderful ability to transmit profound ideas in a readily-graspable way. Although this is an introductory text, it contains many perspectives that are expressed in a unique way, so it would be quite valuable even for the more advanced student of Jewish mysticism.
Who are we and how do we define our inner selves? In his last work, Professor Stephen Prickett presents a literary and cultural exploration of our inner selves – and how we have created and written about them – from the Old Testament to social media. What he finds is that although our secret, inner, sense of self – what we feel makes us distinctively 'us' – seems a natural and permanent part of being human, it is in fact surprisingly new. Whilst confessional religious writings, from Augustine to Jane Austen, or even diaries of 20th-century Holocaust victims, have explored inwards as part of a path to self-discovery, our inner space has expanded beyond any possible personal experience. This development has enhanced our capacity not merely to write about what we have never seen, but even to create fantasies and impossible fictions around them. Yet our secret selves can also be a source of terror. The fringes of our inner worlds are often porous, ill-defined and susceptible to frightening forms of external control. Mystics and poets, from Dante to John Henry Newman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, sought God in their secret spaces not least because they feared the 'abyss beneath.' From the origin of human consciousness through modern history and into the future, Secret Selves uses literature to consider the profound possibilities and ramifications of our evolving ideas of self.
In this long-out-of-print counterculture classic, Dr. John C. Lilly takes readers behind the scenes into the inner life of a scientist exploring inner space, or “far-out spaces,” as Lilly called them. The book explains how he derived his theory of the operations of the human mind and brain from his personal experiences and experiments in solitude, isolation, and confinement; LSD; and other methods of mystical experience. It also includes glimpses into Lilly's friendship with such 1960s' notables as Oscar Ichazo, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Albert Hofmann, Fritz Perls, and Claudio Narajo. Written for the non-specialist, Center of the Cyclone shows an important, modern thinker at his most personal and profound.
